According to a person with knowledge of Jordan's plans in the event he is hired at Rutgers, interim head coach David Cox and assistant coach Van Macon will remain on staff under the new head coach. The person asked not to be identified because the negotiations have not yet been finalized and the school is supposed to make all announcements regarding personnel hires.

Keeping Cox and Macon on staff will allow Jordan to immediately begin the process of retaining players from this past season's team to return to Rutgers.

A total of five players have asked for their releases or have already received them and announced intentions to transfer since the end of the season. Rarely-used guards Malick Kone and Vincent Garrett announced their intent to transfer the day before former head coach Mike Rice's behavior on practice tapes became public, leading to his firing.

In the days and weeks since Rice's firing, three key players from the last two seasons at Rutgers — Eli Carter, Jerome Seagears and Mike Poole — all have sought releases from their scholarships.

Seagears has already received his and can freely transfer to another school if he so chooses, while Poole and Carter — the team's leading scorer the last two years — have both asked Rutgers for their releases within the past week.

While Jordan is an unknown commodity within the college coaching ranks — he was last coaching in college as an assistant at Rutgers in 1992 — keeping Cox and Macon could help the process of keeping some of those five players in Piscataway. Or preventing further defections of a roster that has been gutted since the end of the 2012-13 season. Remaining members of the team voiced their support for Cox at a public gathering on campus a week ago.

Both Cox and Macon were hired by Rice when he arrived at Rutgers in 2010. While they were seen on the practice tapes which led to Rice's firing and the resignation of fellow assistant coach Jimmy Martelli, the internal investigation conducted by the university cleared them of any wrongdoing.

Cox served as the team's interim head coach for three games during Rice's suspension in December.